The projects of Yucef Merhi (Caracas, 1977) are situated in a territory where language, technology, and history interrogate one another. For more than two decades, his practice has articulated programming, hacking, video games, and technological devices from different eras as critical tools for thinking about the present. In his work, the technical is never neutral; it becomes a field of friction from which to address philosophical, linguistic, political, ecological, and social questions, making visible the often imperceptible fluctuations of the contemporary environment.

In After Atari Poetry XXVI, Merhi returns to one of the investigations that structurally traverse his practice in order to activate a critical reflection on language, technological obsolescence, and processes of cultural construction. The series consists of eight unique pieces made of bicolour methacrylate, in which text is presented as visual matter rather than merely as a vehicle of meaning. Each module incorporates a short poem by the artist, translated into the four most widely spoken languages in Spain—Castilian Spanish, Catalan-Valencian-Balearic, Galician, and Basque—highlighting the political and affective dimension of translation as a form of coexistence.

These texts were originally conceived to be programmed and displayed on a cathode-ray television using an Atari 2600 console, a condition that determines both their two-line structure and their formal economy. In the Spanish version, the poem states: “the poet dreams of his silence / a silence impervious to words.” Far from a merely lyrical reading, the statement points toward a site of tension, where language becomes insufficient and reveals an irreducible remainder, a zone of indeterminacy that exceeds signification.

The pixelated typography designed by Merhi, together with the spatial arrangement of the texts, refers to early systems of digital representation and to the Atari Poetry series, initiated in the year 2000. The colours of the methacrylate likewise evoke the graphic palette associated with Atari and its video games, inscribing the work within a specific technological genealogy. From this position, After Atari Poetry XXVI articulates a convergence of linguistic diversity, shared memory, and critical awareness of models of cultural production and transmission, proposing a poetic gaze that does not shy away from questions of sustainability, both technological and symbolic, in the present.

The series La lettre consists of eight generative videos operating at the intersection of kinetic poetry, geometry, and physical models, giving rise to a hypnotic visual experience. Each piece unfolds the French verse “le poète respire au pied de la lettre,” written by Merhi himself, as a field of forces in constant transformation. The letters move vertically across an undulating surface, generating a continuous rhythm that destabilizes linear reading.

The animated background evokes the wave logic that, in the field of quantum physics, describes the probabilistic behaviour of particles. Rather than illustrating a scientific concept, Merhi establishes a formal analogy between these wave functions and certain visual languages inherited from kinetic art, activating a zone of resonance between science, perception, and abstraction.

At the same time, La lettre invites a reading from the psychoanalytic field by referring to the Lacanian concept of “the letter” as the material support of discourse, that which fixes but also fractures the relationship between language and reality. In these videos, the letter does not appear as a stable unit, but as a mutable entity, subject to forces that make it appear and disappear.

Each work thus functions as a visual meditation on the fragility of symbolic systems and on the way human signs emerge, reorganize, and ultimately dissolve within a continuous flow. In this unstable space, between code, image, and breath, language reveals itself less as an instrument of control than as an open process, traversed by contingency and unpredictability.

Guy Debord warned in The Society of the Spectacle that the admired figures in whom the system is personified are well known for not being what they are—figures that have fallen below the threshold of the most minimal intellectual life, fully aware of it. Merely spectacular rebellion can thus coexist with resigned acceptance of the established order, revealing how dissatisfaction itself has become a commodity and a raw material of the system.

Against this logic, Merhi’s work offers neither slogans nor closed solutions, but spaces for pause and critical breathing. As Walt Whitman wrote, the word Democracy remains a great word whose history has yet to be written, because it has yet to be lived. In that interval—between code and poem, between machine and silence—Yucef Merhi’s practice invites us to rethink language, technology, and the common as open processes, still to be imagined.

José Luis Pérez Pont